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Coover, Robert

Entry updated 13 January 2025. Tagged: Author, Theatre.

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(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see Decadence). The Origin of the Brunists (1965) subverts the millennial fantasy tropes at its heart, as Giovanni Bruno and his followers – the historical Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) is clearly evoked – await the End of the World; its sequel, the exceedingly ambitious The Brunist Day of Wrath (2014), engages ferociously with fundamentalist sects (see Religion) in its attempts to anatomize America, at times with a minute attentiveness to naturalistic detail, at times hinting at a fantastic reading of the whole (see Fantastika).

The Universal Baseball Association Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) also problematizes its Fantasy premise, the eponymous dreamer's creation of a Pocket Universe where Baseball can be immortally safe under the control of the proprietor, whose name can be pronounced "Yahweh" (see Godgame), but need not be. Pricksongs & Descants: Fictions (coll 1969), the later A Child Again (coll 2005) and, more comprehensively, Going for a Beer: Selected Short Fictions (coll 2018), contain stories and fables of sf interest, often (as in his longer works) congested with a sense of the theatricality of the decline of the West. The plays assembled in A Theological Position: Plays. The Kid; Love Scene; Rip Awake; A Theological Position (coll 1972) include "The Kid" (Spring 1970 Tri-Quarterly) and "Rip Awake", the former featuring Billy the Kid (see also Westerns) and the latter Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle.

A Political Fable (August 1968 New American Review as "The Cat in the Hat for President"; rev 1980 chap) is a Satirical fantasy in which Dr Seuss's Cat in the Hat, dressed as a bombastic Uncle Sam, runs for President, only to be skinned at the end in order to avoid an army coup. The Public Burning (1977) can be read as an Alternate History of the early 1950s, taking in the death of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and examining Richard Nixon, a figure Coover also anatomized in Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (1987), where he is visualized as Iron Butt, a great football player from 1937. Charlie in the House of Rue (1980 chap), in which a fantasticated Charlie Chaplin goes walkabout in the interstices between film and reality, is a Hollywood fantasia (see California), as is the material assembled in A Night at the Movies, or You Must Remember This (coll of linked stories 1987). Spanking the Maid (1981 chap) is a phantasmagoric Parody of philosophical erotica, told in an archaicized diction. The eponymous Pierrot-like lover protagonist of The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director's Cut (2002) is only real in his various filmic representations, some of them wholly fantastic, and all of which congregate into a cubist assemblage of descriptions of the ambivalent Utopia of Cinecity, the place where all these dreams and interrogations have substance. In Aesop's Forest (1986 chap dos) the teller of fables is destroyed by the Beast Fable animals he had created. The eponymous hero of Pinocchio in Venice (1991), an old professor, travels to Venice to find the Blue-Haired Fairy, and slowly reverts to wood, returning to his origins: the puppet within the flesh. The elusive wife in John's Wife (1996) is a kind of ghost.

Briar Rose (1997) is a Twice-Told version of the tale of the Sleeping Beauty, while Stepmother (2004 chap) devastatingly incorporates a wide range of fairy stories in one tale of unremitting death and demolition. A Child Again (coll 2005) assembles an array of shorter Twice-Tolds [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], and Noir (2010) is a nightmarishly comic Parody of the form, involving intricate traversals of the magically deepening world Underground, beneath the City of night.

Coming some time after Ghost Town (1998), a highly fantasticated Western in which a Mysterious Stranger is himself seduced by bespoke antics in the eponymous town, Huck Out West (2017) definitively admixes Coover's long and intricate engagement with the region in a Sequel by Other Hands to Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with Huck narrating his hegira into mythic territories westward, accompanied by Tom Sawyer, with whom he plans to create a travelling circus (but Tom half-betrays him, as always, in the end, and heads eastwards into the Gilded Age of America); the story has meanwhile extended into the American Civil War, with Huck and a Native American teller of Trickster tales [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] embroiled in what seems an apocalyptic world. The large self-narrating cast assembled at the top of a New York high-rise in Open House (2023), as a property-hungry gangster prepares to highjack the entire proceedings, may seem, in its performative disarray at the end of things, to draw Coover's long oeuvre together at its close. [JC]

Robert Lowell Coover

born Charles City, Iowa: 4 February 1932

died Warwick, Warwickshire: 5 October 2024

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